The Reinvention of Song Meaning
by Caitlyn Wherry
“Subterranean Homesick Alien” blared around us. As I let reality fade into the album’s sound, I memorized the comfort of this moment: the warm leather sticking to my thighs, well-worn books and crunched papers, the chance to fade away into an album’s sound. We were a mere three tracks into OK Computer when the familiar tunes meshed together, forging something entirely new—the sound of a semester.
From time to time, I find a track that comes to define a period in my life, a song that sounds like the emotions behind my experiences. And I knew this was it for that moment. Amidst the croons and methodical plucking, I smelled your earthy tobacco and felt your regretful lips; I heard unending trains of laughter and felt the abdominal pangs from the ironic screams of praise to the all-too-dead goth aesthetic; I saw black converse kicked up on a train seat and tasted the Jitterbus’s Guatemalan blend.
But, in listening to the song through this lens, was I stepping out of line?
My experience at that instant created a music of its own. The moment was beautiful in its own existence and, yet, I sensed it all within the far-outdated Radiohead that happened to be thrown on the turntable that evening. What did it mean that the feelings “Subterranean Homesick Alien” evoked for me were such a far cry from “The dust and the screaming/the yuppies networking/the panic, the vomit” Yorke wrote of in ’97 on “Paranoid Android”? OK Computer was released the same year I was born. The cultural perspective from which it was written is not the same in which I exist. And I, still, dare to challenge whatever remaining human connection I may have with the art by reinventing the intention of the song. Simultaneously, I refuse to give the lyrics the attention that my belief in the Marxian perspective of the workmanship ideal pleads it deserves.
This is a pattern for me. I continually force art to exist in ways for which it wasn’t intended. When I hear the opening notes of Dexys Midnight Runners’s “Come On Eileen,” I remove it from the artist’s longing and eventual seduction of the young Eileen. No; when I hear those chords, I am swinging my car around the L-bend entrance of my high school. I am dancing, flailing, waltzing with my best friend. I hear him scream, “You are it. You get it,” as we run through the halls, finally freeing ourselves from their hollow judgment. This was our soundtrack. Similarly, the delicate whines of Waxahatchee’s “Dixie Cups and Jars” reek of my underclassman insecurities and the entirety of Two Door’s Beacon catalogues my stint in Peru, each song capturing a snapshot of another location, bout of motion sickness, or episode of nighttime longing.
Cobain bemoaned the distance between artist and audience in Nevermind’s “In Bloom,” reproaching the inattentive listener for liking his “pretty songs” yet not understanding where he was coming from as an artist. For this reason, I spent years judging the casual listener. I deemed lack of knowledge about a song ignorance, without realizing that the romanticization of Cobain’s lyrics was creating the very same divide between artist and audience. I was guilty of this very act—both in idealizing Cobain’s lyricism and in redefining the meaning of songs by removing them from the artist’s vision.
Still, I have to ask myself: Can using art to lose yourself to the beauty of a moment augment it? Can challenging the intended meaning of an artist’s work act as a means of interaction between artists and audiences, even between those that are generations apart? I think it’s possible. And, for that, I will romanticize the fuck out of every musical, sticky-leather-filled moment.